You can’t trust your feelings (most of them :-)

Posted on November 12, 2009January 11, 2017

Ever been advised to “trust your feelings”? After all, isn’t this the way people make all kinds of decisions — including important ones like who to marry, when to quit your job, etc.? Ah, yes … we’ll jump right in if the feeling is right!

Everyone likes to think that their feelings are trustworthy, but is it really true? To what extent is it a good idea to trust our feelings? I suspect it is much less often than we’d like to think.

Of course, it all depends on what kind of feelings we are talking about. Certainly, we cannot trust decisions we make when we are feeling fearful or anxious — neither should we when we are infatuated and flush with wishful thinking. One non-obvious rule of thumb that I’ve learned for myself — the stronger the feeling, the less trustworthy it is!

There is one kind of feeling that we CAN trust when it comes to making decisions, however. Ironically, it is the one that is hardest to notice. It is often called that “gut feeling” — aka intuition. It’s much more subtle and quiet than fear or lust, for instance, and almost impossible to perceive when these stronger feelings are in play. (Which is why humans are so terrible at making good decisions!)

Many people experience intuition as a feeling, but there are other ways that it can show up. How does the experience of intuition happen for you?